by DNAinfo.com

"The city is planning to divide the K-8 version of P.S. 85's citywide gifted programbetween two buildings, including one that is far from the nearest subway stop, upsetting parents who have been pushing for an expansion of the popular STEM Academy, parents said.

During a meeting at P.S. 85 Wednesday night, DOE officials told STEM parents they want to split-site the G&T program into two new schools — co-locating its younger classes at elementary school P.S. 76 and siting the middle school grades at I.S. 126, at 31-51 21st St., both identified by the city as underutilized.

STEM is currently a K-5 program housed at P.S. 85, at 23-70 31st St. in Astoria. The building doesn't have enough space to allow the program to expand through eighth grade, the DOE has said.

All of the other citywide gifted programs are housed in the same building and have their own administrations. [The proposed expansion would allow STEM to take in two classes per grade, in addition to including a middle school, thereby creating more coveted citywide G&T seats,parents told Insideschools.]

Parents who attended Wednesday's meeting said the DOE told them STEM will be getting its own administration — something they have been fighting for. They say split-siting STEM between two different buildings will force its administration, as well as parents who have more than one child in the program, to juggle between the two different schools.

"I'd say that we range from being very unhappy to bitterly unhappy," said dad Tim Smith, who has two children in STEM, one in fourth grade and one in kindergarten, who attended the meeting with the DOE. 

Even if the program is forced to accept two locations, he said, parents are vehemently opposed to having the younger grades atP.S. 76.

Though the school is on the list of the DOE's underutilized buildings, it has a large number of special education classes that require more space for therapy and programming, parents said."

[Read more of this story on DNAInfo.com,including suspicions that the PS 17 school building -- which STEM families had identified as possibly having space for STEM -- is being considered instead for a charter school. Parents suspect that the DOE wants to place a Success Academy charter school there in 2014 because Success is planning to open two new schools in District 30 in 2014. Neither the DOE or Success would confirm that possibility to DNAInfo.

 

Michal Melamed, the parent of a 2nd grader at STEM, contacted Insideschools to express her concerns about locating the citywide gifted school at PS 76, because it would take rooms from the ASD NEST program there, which serves autistic children.

 

"We don't appreciate the fact that the DOE is pitting parents against parents," she said. "Parents don't want to displace children."

 

She said parents hope to persuade the Education Department to reconsider where to locate STEM Academy before the current proposal is posted and put up for a vote by the Panel for Educational Policy. The Panel must approve all school expansions and changes in location and almost always approves most proposed changes.]